Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 24:4 (Autumn 2010)
Article: Gender And The Puritan Mission To The Native People Of New England, 1620-1750
Author: Jason Eden

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PP 24:4 (Autumn 2010) p. 4

Gender And The Puritan Mission To The Native People Of New England, 1620-1750

Jason Eden

Jason Eden is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. His wife, Naomi, is a gerontologist, and together they are studying the history of age segregation and ageism among North American Christians.

The Puritans are not known for their egalitarianism. Indeed, the word “Puritan” instead conjures up images of witch-burning, fun-draining, Quaker-persecuting authoritarians who restricted women to a life of dreary housework and perpetual childrearing. There is some truth to this stereotype. Certainly, the typical Puritan minister viewed women as subordinate beings who needed to keep quiet in church and be submissive to their husbands. As Benjamin Wadsworth noted in a sermon titled The Weil-Ordered Family, “The husband is called the head of the woman. It belongs to the head to rule and govern.”1 The cases of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer—strong-willed women who suffered banishment or execution for defying the established order—lend further credence to our stereotypes about the Puritans.2

On the other hand, historians have carefully documented how much of our vision of seventeenth-century New England Puritans incorrectly associates them with nineteenth-century Victorian-era norms and values. The Puritans were relatively open and flexible when it came to sex, for example. Although adultery was a serious crime, church records reveal that fornication was quite common in New England churches and grace was readily extended to those who repented of this sin. Ministers talked openly about sex in their sermons, and husbands and wives celebrated the pleasures of their sexual union in private letters. Furthermore, Puritans drank alcohol often, and in relatively large quantities, and were at least ambivalent, and sometimes downright permissive, when it came to the issue of tobacco smoking.3 Given the fact that the Puritans differed from Victorian norms in these areas, is it possible that the English Puritans of Americas colonial period were actually more egalitarian than our stereotypes about them might presume?

My analysis of records related to Puritan missionary work would suggest that the answer to the above question is “yes.” At least in regard to Christianized Indians, Puritans in New England were open to the idea of women taking an active role in church ministry. Furthermore, interacting with Indians seems to have forced missionaries to rethink some of their basic assumptions about Gods intentions for Christian men and women. Admittedly, the...

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